


Not this time.

by BoundHopes (Hadrian_Pendragons)



Series: BH Bad Things Happen Bingo [1]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Angst, Komaeda Nagito Hates Himself, Komaeda Nagito Is Trying His Best, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, intended tense change halfway through, light mention of medication and disease, so much goddamn angst, someone take these kids from me, suicide bombing, this one hurt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25625050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hadrian_Pendragons/pseuds/BoundHopes
Summary: The Remnants were finally getting their chance to get their lives back, thanks to the newly rebuilt Future Foundation and one Naegi Makoto. Komaeda, slowly starting to find the center of his world, refuses to let his boyfriend leave on his own.When the building blows on their little travel expedition, and the familiar hand shoves him, he can't believe he deluded himself into thinking it wouldn't be the same as every other time.
Relationships: Hinata Hajime/Komaeda Nagito
Series: BH Bad Things Happen Bingo [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857514
Comments: 2
Kudos: 106





	Not this time.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Bad Things Happen Bingo! Prompt: Pinned Down by Wreckage
> 
> Though I took some liberties and it's more like trapped under a broken building, but also not even about the trapped person and still manages to hurt SO. HAVE FUN WITH THAT.

“Are you  _ sure  _ you wanna do this?” Hinata had asked, skepticism lacing every syllable of his words.

Komaeda had simply smiled, though it had turned Hinata’s frown into a scowl. 

“I’ll follow you wherever you may go, Hinata-kun.”

“Komaeda,” he had groaned, put-upon, a hand scrubbing down his face. “I’m asking if you  _ want  _ to. I need to know that this is your decision.”

“Do you not want me to?” Komaeda asked, hurt in his tone. It isn’t entirely false. He knew, more than Hinata-kun ever could, how much of a burden, a weakness, a liability he could be. He wasn’t anyone important or anything special—devastatingly weak and helpless, really—so if Hinata didn’t want him to, he wouldn’t—

Komaeda physically stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.  _ No. No, not this time. Not this time, not this time, not this time— _

That was what he told himself, anyway. Those were the words he had taught his mind, since they emerged from the pods, since Hinata had decided not to let him go and told him  _ he wouldn’t be going anywhere.  _

Even when Komaeda stepped off of the precarious ledge himself, Hinata had been there to catch him and pull him back. 

A hand had touched his face. 

“Nagito. Hey. You okay?”

Fairly redundant to ask. He had been told so many times before that he most certainly  _ wasn’t okay. _

He had leaned into the touch. He was allowed that. Hinata had told him so. He was allowed to take that for himself whenever he felt like it, so long as Hinata was up to it. It wasn’t often he wasn’t, and he always made sure to say it wasn’t because of him. Not that Komaeda often believed it, but… he could latch onto the words and slip a little less far down the slope than if he had nothing at all. 

He smiled again. Reached up and entangled their fingers, and opened his eyes. 

“I’m sure, H-Hajime.” And wasn’t it something, that he could actually say Hinata’s first name, as if they were equals on the same playing field, as if he wasn’t lowly and dirty and how could he ever think himself equal to someone like Hinata—

Another breath. His smile wavered, but did not fall. “I  _ want  _ to go with you. I want to… understand it more. What this means. What  _ you  _ mean to me.” He meets Hinata’s olive eyes and doesn’t look away, “And I don’t believe in the Future Foundation enough to let you go alone.”

“Even if it’s Naegi running the place now?” Hinata joked hesitantly, a smirk on his face, rubbing his thumb under Komaeda’s eye. It relaxed him. It pulled tension from his shoulders. It was  _ Hinata  _ and it wasn’t going to go away.  _ Not this time.  _

The mention of the Ultimate Hope still brought some hysterical admiration to mind, but—as time had helped with—he was able to calm himself down and think of the world with a center. A center named Hajime Hinata. 

“Hope doesn’t always mean protection,” he had smirked back, and Hinata’s own widened in relief. It was still somewhat of a touchy thing to bring up, that constant, raging blizzard of “self-destructive” thinking, as Tsumiki-san had so graciously informed him of the dangers of. In the same breath she had assigned him several medications and set about researching and developing more, cursing the Future Foundation for letting the Ultimate Pharmacist die, because it still wasn’t  _ entirely  _ his own fault. Or so she said. He would never believe anything but his luck diagnosed him with such disease.

But, as the entirety of their class had drilled into his mind and reminded him of every day, believing in things intangible led to nowhere. It gave him nothing. It most certainly did not allow him to keep his place beside  _ Hajime— _ beside, not behind, not below, not far, far away from.

He tightened his grip. “I don’t want to leave you, Hajime.”

Hinata had blinked, smiled, and pulled him closer. Komaeda had hesitated, but wrapped his arms around the man he called his partner and his  _ boyfriend  _ and his  _ lover.  _

“Thank you, Nagito.”

And that had been that, a promise made in the quiet of their room, the day before Hinata had agreed to work with the Ultimate Hope and his organization to give the victims of Enoshima a place to live out their lives. A place that wasn’t a secluded island where the ever-sociable members of their group went stir crazy inhabiting. Even the reclusive ones and Hinata-kun himself had begun to find the days waking to nothing but quiet, sandy beaches and salty air stifling. 

Naegi-kun always seemed to reach for something he couldn’t see, and never seemed to falter. Komaeda, as loathsome as the feeling was toward someone he so admired, found himself jealous that he could never do the same. 

But Komaeda could admit that with Hajime, he didn’t need hope nor despair. Hajime was simply Hajime. 

_ That had been that.  _

_ If only anything ever lasted.  _

_ No. No. Not this time. It wasn’t supposed to happen this time. No, no— _

_ Of course it happened this time,  _ a scalding, painfully torturous voice speaks back,  _ It’s every time. Every single time.Your despair turns into hope, hope is infected with despair and crumbles, and the cycle starts again. It’s just your luck, is it not? You did this. _

“Hajime—“ He can’t look away. So quickly, he had been shoved out of the blast zone, ears ringing, the image of a rogue agent of despair—or hope?  _ They _ were the world’s despair, after all, and so many people hated them—strapped with explosives and grinning maniacally burned into his mind and  _ Hajime, Hajime, Hajime had been— _

_ Hajime had been beside him.  _

_ Beside him.  _

Komaeda inhales, chalky concrete reaching his lungs and forcing a hacking cough out of him. The rubble doesn’t move. 

_ Your fault.  _

He curls in, eyes too blurry to see the broken remains of the building anymore. How many Future Foundation men had been inside? Had the Ultimate Hope even made it out?

_ My fault.  _

He laughs, hoarse, breathy, coughing halfway through. 

Did any of that  _ really matter? _

_ Last time. This time. Next time. How could he ever fool himself into believing in people? How could he ever— _

_ … because it was Hajime.  _

_ Hajime. Hajime. Hajime. H— _

“Komaeda-kun!”

He doesn’t move. Of course the Ultimate Hope is still alive.  _ The real one.  _ Not the one Hope’s Peak had created. Not the person they had created him from. Not  _ Hajime. _

_ Hajime. Hajime. Hajime— _

A hand finds his shoulder. 

Komaeda isn’t certain what his body was doing. But he could feel it, as if possessed, stand unsteadily and throw all of his little weight— _ Hajime told him to eat more, Hajime told him to take care of himself— _ into a  _ punch.  _

And then he froze. He wasn’t even looking at Naegi-kun, knocked to the ground, probably staring wide-eyed and betrayed and, well,  _ that’s fine, isn’t it? _

_ How dare he hit the Ultimate Hope? What sort of person did he think he was? Nothing, insignificant, disgusting, no, not even that, nothing meant he wasn’t even worth the expense needed for emotion, so why, really, did he exist at all? _

_ Hajime. _

_ Death, maybe, could be an answer, but if he died, he would have to take measures. Make certain no one would ever be able to find him. It would do no good to put the burden of his body on someone else. _

_ Hajime— _

**_Laughing at your own lover’s death. Isn’t that just full of despair?_ **

He flinches. 

Those words even  _ sounded  _ like  _ her.  _

It was hilarious. It was painful and disturbing and wrong and  _ so completely hilarious.  _

_ Even now, she’s still in my mind.  _

“Hajime. Hajime.  _ Hajime. Hajime, no, Hajime, Hajime—“ _

“Komaeda-kun.”

He can’t stop the name from slipping off his lips. Maybe, if he says it enough times, it will lose its meaning. Lose it’s emotion. Lose the wrenching it gives his gut and the tearing it does as it pulls his heart out of his chest in a mess of red, red,  _ that would be a painful way to die, wouldn’t it? Ha ha.  _

“Komaeda-kun. Hinata-kun is fine. He’s alive.”

_ Was someone speaking? Did he have ears? If he did, he didn’t deserve them. He didn’t deserve words, he didn’t deserve existence, was there any way to erase himself right here, right now, where he could simply cease? _

“Komaeda-kun…”

_ It has to be terrifying to watch him giggle himself into a stupor. After his boyfriend just died. Quite the sight. The center of his world was gone, after all. What was there to hold on to if it was his own luck and his own fault and his own despicableness that brought such a fate to the people around him— _

_ “Nagito.” _

A breath fills his lungs so harshly that one might think he had been drowning. Komaeda’s head lifts from where he had buried it in his knees—had he fallen? Curled up?—cold hands scrambling to take the receiver and hold it to his ear and the rest of the world fell away like pieces of shattered glass. 

“H-“ His throat won’t cooperate. Neither will his eyes. When he lifts his grimy hand to try and clear them. It comes away wet. “H-H-Hajime—!”

_ “Nagito, listen to me. Hey. Listen to my voice. You hear me, don’t you? You hear me. You won’t be hearing me if I were hurt. I’m not. I’m alive. Okay? We’re a little stuck at the moment but almost no one got hurt. I’m not hurt. Now, I want you to breathe with me, okay? Just follow my count.” _

He begins counting. Inhale. Exhale. All in that way that had become routine after Komaeda had gone one too many times in a stupor and unable to operate his own lungs. Inhale. Exhale. Hinata’s voice was a steady, firm rhythm over the static of the radio-device—and what sort of miracle was it that they could reach them through the rubble?—that Komaeda would hold oh so much tighter if not for the fear of breaking it and losing the only thing that was keeping him in place in the raging, icy sea of despair—

_ “Can you breathe, Nagito? Do you need me to keep going?” _

Inhale. Exhale.

He did so a few more times, before forcing a negative from his throat, because Hinata was waiting for a response, and if he waited, then Komaeda wouldn’t be able to hear him, and he might not be there—

_ “Okay. Okay.”  _ A pause in which Hinata takes a breath of his own, audible over the microphone.  _ “Listen, Nagito. ‘I’m not alone.’ Can you repeat that to me?” _

“I-I-I’m not—not alone.”

_ “‘Hinata is alive.’” _

“Hinata is a-a-alive.”

_ Alive.  _

_ “‘I am still here.’” _

“I am still here.”

_ “‘I am not alone.’” _

“I am not alone.”

It repeats. It repeats until the shattered glass around him begins to reassemble. Until he can finally feel the sunlight and the uncomfortable dirt and concrete dust on his skin. Until he can notice the people already working their way into digging through the rubble—barked at by the blond man that had introduced himself as Togami to go slowly and carefully—and Naegi-kun standing not too far away. 

_ “Can you hear me, Nagito?” _

“I hear you. I hear you. Hajime. You’re alive. Right?”

_ “That’s right. Are you okay, Nagito?” _

“Something… hurts. Don’t… know what. Not bleeding. Nothing broken.” He can tell by the quick glance over himself, but the words sound almost like a stilted and broken recording of his voice. “Not certain… if I’m completely grounded.”

_ “We’ll be out soon, okay?”  _ Hinata tells him gently.  _ “No time at all. Just don’t move.” _

“Don’t go.”

_ “I won’t. I’ll stay right here. Stay on the radio with me?” _

“Don’t go.”

_ “I’m not, Nagito. I promise. I’m not going anywhere.” _

_ This time. Not this time. Please, not this time. Don’t let it happen this time.  _

_ Don’t take him from me.  _

“Okay.” He says, voice small. “Okay. Hajime.  _ Hajime.” _

_ “Yeah. It’s me. I’m right here.” _


End file.
